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Files Detail Debate in E.P.A. on Clean Air

The Natural Resources Defense Council released documents today from the Environmental Protection Agency that shed light on the heated debate in the agency over the Bush administration's proposals to change clean air rules.

For a year, the White House and the energy industry have pushed the agency to revise a regulation that compels companies, mostly power plants and oil refineries, to modernize pollution control equipment when they upgrade their plants. The industry has argued that the regulation, called new source review, is onerous and contradictory.

Environmentalists and others contend that companies are trying to gut a rule that has improved air quality while costing industry billions of dollars in upgrades and fines.

The documents, which the resources council said came from meetings in the first two weeks of January, show that some career officials in the general counsel's office at the agency were concerned that changes that political appointees in the agency were considering would violate the Clean Air Act and loosen crucial standards on controlling pollution.

''The documents are fairly damning indictments of what the Bush administration wants to do to the Clean Air Act,'' said John Walke, director of the Clean Air Project at the council. ''And the party that gave them to us was obviously concerned about that kind of outcome.''

A spokesman for the agency, Joe Martyak, said the documents reflected the usual give-and-take in the agency as it tried to streamline the pollution regulation, not a final decision.

''You're talking about one meeting in an entire deliberative process,'' Mr. Martyak said. ''It's no indication of where we are months later. That's the discussion on that day, not what we've decided on.''

He pointed out that the agency needed several months to draw up a final revision of the regulation on new sources to pass on to the White House. Eliminating the regulation would require an act of Congress, because it is part of the Clean Air Act. But the administration can add provisions that change it, a move that Mr. Martyak said the agency was considering.

The documents offer a snapshot of those discussions. The two sides weighing in on changes are the office of air and radiation, which is headed by a political appointee, Jeffrey R. Holmstead, and the office of the general counsel, which is staffed by career bureaucrats.

Mr. Holmstead's office proposed a measure that would allow companies to have a 10-year cap for an entire plant. Over that period, the plant could counterbalance one year's increase in pollution within another year's decrease, provided the exchange was within the decade.

The resource council explained in a paper that accompanied the documents, ''A facility's pollution increase in 2002, for example, could be 'offset' by a pollution decrease in 1993.''

The measure ''leads to the right environmental result,'' the office of air and radiation argued in the documents. But the general counsel's office countered that 10 years was too long to permit companies such latitude and was not comparable to the current interpretation of the Clean Air Act.

The general counsel's office objected again when the office of air and radiation stated that after the first 10 years, when the emissions targets for a plant are subject to review, the agency could permit it to return to its former levels, rather than compelling it to reduce emissions. The general counsel's office warned that without a readjusted standard, the cap approach was ''legally vulnerable,'' according to the documents.

Moreover, the loose criteria that the office of air and radiation suggested for assessing emissions targets had ''no relationship with air quality and are hard to justify from a legal perspective,'' the general counsel's office stated. The entire issue of the caps was left for superiors to decide.

In a discussion of the effects of another change to new source review, the documents noted that the ''proposal was silent regarding air quality impacts analysis.'' The two groups resolved that ''it is likely that fuzzy rather than clear language will be used to describe this obligation'' of analyzing air quality, theoretically a pivotal component of any rules on air pollution.

The amendments to new source review are just one tack that the administration is taking to reduce its effects. At a lawyers' conference on Monday in Colorado, Mr. Holmstead said that if Congress passed a new White House initiative to reduce pollution from power plants, new source review would no longer be needed, according to The Daily Environment Report, a trade publication.

Mr. Martyak confirmed the report, saying the administration's new ''Clear Skies'' initiative that mandates reductions in crucial emissions over the next 10 years would render new source review redundant. Companies would have a decade to invest in pollution controls to meet the new standards.

But any penalties that they might incur for not reducing their pollution levels would be meted out only after the decade had passed. New source review would remain in effect until then, perhaps in an altered form.